Ferocity: A Novel

By Nicola Lagioia

This Strega Prize winner “ticks all the boxes of a thriller while also being a masterfully written, baroque, many-faceted depiction of modern Italy” (The Spectator).
 
Bari, southern Italy: On a stifling summer night, on the outskirts of town, a young woman named Clara, daughter of the region’s most prominent family of real estate developers, stumbles naked, dazed, and bloodied down a major highway. Her death will be deemed a suicide. Her estranged half-brother, however, cannot free himself from her memory or the questions surrounding her death, and the more he learns about Clara’s life, the more he reveals the moral decay at the core of his family’s ascent to social prominence.
 
Winner of the 2015 Strega Prize, Italy’s preeminent prize for fiction, Ferocity is at once an intimate family saga, a cinematic portrait of the moral and political corruption of an entire society, and a “gripping” tale of suspense (The Irish Times).
 
“Biting social commentary as well as edge-of-seat reading.” —Library Journal (starred review)
 
“Allows the mystery to slowly and captivatingly resolve while offering a layered portrait of contemporary Italian life and the abuses of power that money can excuse.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“Complex, darkly absorbing and mysterious literary fiction.” —Booklist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781609453824

Nicola Lagioia

One of Italy’s most critically acclaimed contemporary novelists, Nicola Lagioia has been the recipient of the Volponi, Straniero, and Viareggio awards, in addition to the Strega. In 2010 he was named one of Italy’s best writers under forty. He has been a jury member of the Venice Film Festival and is the program director of the Turin Book Fair. Lagioia is a contributor to Italy’s most prominent culture pages. He was born in Bari, and lives in Rome. Ferocity is his English-language debut.

Book preview

PART ONE

Those who know say nothing;

those who speak do not know

Apale three-quarter moon lit up the state highway at two in the morning. The road connected the province of Taranto to Bari, and at that time of night it was usually deserted. As it ran north, the roadway oscillated, aligning with and diverging from an imaginary axis, leaving behind it olive groves and vineyards and short rows of industrial sheds that resembled airplane hangars. At kilometer marker 38, a gas station appeared. It was the last one for a while, and aside from the self-serve pumps, vending machines that served coffee and cold food had recently been installed. To promote the new attractions, the owner had installed a sky dancer on the roof of the auto repair shop. One of those puppets that stand fifteen feet tall, pumped up by powerful motorized fans.

The inflatable barker fluttered in the empty air and would continue to do so until the morning light. More than anything else, it made one think of a restless ghost.

After passing that strange apparition the countryside ran on, flat and unvarying for miles. It was almost like moving through the desert. Then, in the distance, a sizzling tiara marked the city. Beyond the guardrail, in contrast, lay untilled fields, fruit trees, and a few country houses nicely concealed by hedges. Through those expanses moved nocturnal animals.

Tawny owls traced long slanting lines through the air. Gliding, they waited to flap their wings until they were just inches from the ground so that insects, terrified by the sudden tempest of shrubs and dead leaves, would rush out into the open, sealing their own fates. A cricket, perched on a jasmine leaf, extended its antennae unevenly. And, all around, impalpably, like a vast tide suspended in the air, a fleet of moths moved in the polarized light of the celestial vault.

Unchanged over millions of years, the tiny, fuzzy-winged creatures were one with the equation that ensured their stability in flight. Tied to the moon’s invisible thread, they were scouring the territory by the thousands, swaying from side to side to dodge the attacks of birds of prey. Then, as had been happening every night for the past twenty years or so, a few hundred units broke their link with the sky. Believing they were still dealing with the moon, they homed in on the floodlights of a small group of detached houses. As they approached the artificial lights, the golden angle of their flight was shattered. Their movements became an obsessive circular dance that only death could interrupt.

A nasty black heap of insects lay on the veranda of the first of these residences.

It was a small villa with a pool, a blocky, two-story construction. Every night, before going to bed, the owners turned on all the outdoor lights. They were convinced that an illuminated yard discouraged burglars. Wall-mounted floodlights on the veranda. Large oval polyurethane lights at the foot of the rose bushes. A series of faint vertical light fixtures lined the path to the swimming pool.

This kept the cycle of moths in a state of immanence: carcasses on the veranda, tortured bodies on the scalding hot plastic, in flight among the rose bushes. Just a few yards away, as it had the night before and the night before that, a young stray cat was moving cautiously across the lawn. It was hoping for another bag of garbage left out by mistake. Beneath the branches of the rhododendrons, a snake was splaying its jaws as it struggled to devour a still-live mouse.

The heavy barrier of leaves that separated the villa from its twin next door started to shake. The cat cocked its ears, raised a paw in the air. Only the moths continued their dance, undisturbed in the spring air.

It was against the background of the impalpable grey-green bank of haze that the young woman made her entrance into the garden. She was naked, and ashen, and covered in blood. She had red polish on her toenails, nice ankles, and a pair of legs that were long but not skinny. Soft hips. A full, taut pair of breasts. She put one foot in front of the other—slowly, tottering, cutting straight across the lawn.

She wasn’t much over thirty, but she couldn’t have been younger than twenty-five because of the intangible relaxing of tissues that turns the slenderness of certain adolescent girls into something perfect. Her fair complexion highlighted the scratches running down her legs, while the bruises on her ribs and arms and lower back, like so many Rorschach inkblots, seemed to tell the story of her inner life through the surface. Her face was swollen, her lips slashed vertically by a deep cut.

That the animals were alarmed was to be expected. The fact that they hadn’t remained so was far stranger. The snake returned to its prey. The crickets resumed their chirping. The young woman was no longer of any concern to them. More than her harmlessness, they seemed to sense that she was dragging herself once and for all toward the place that eliminates all differences between species. The young woman stepped on the grass, surrounded by this sort of ancient indifference. She was bathed in the glittering mantle that the swimming pool was reflected onto the walls of the villa. She passed the bicycle abandoned in the drive. Then, just as she had appeared in that small corner of the world, she left it. She went through the hedges on the far side of the yard. She began to vanish into the underbrush.

Now she was moving through the fields in the moonlight. Her blank gaze was still locked onto the spool that was drawing her along a route that ran identical and opposite to that of the moths: one step after another, drawing blood as she crushed sharp stones and branches underfoot. This went on for some minutes.

The underbrush turned into a floury expanse. After not even a hundred yards the path narrowed. A dark surface, far more compact. If she’d been in full contact with her nervous system, at this point the young woman would have sensed the strain on her calves as she climbed uphill, the wind freely whipping her skin. She reached the top and didn’t even feel the chilly metallic 500-watt power that once again revealed the curve of her waist.

Five minutes later she was walking on the asphalt, straight down the center of the state highway. The streetlamps were behind her. If she’d lifted her eyes she’d have seen, beyond the curves of the gas station sign, the pathetic profile of the sky dancer lunging skyward. She followed the roadway as it bent to the right. The road straightened out again. It was in this way—a pale figure equidistant from the lines of the guardrails—that she must have been reflected in the animal’s pupils.

A gigantic sewer rat had made it that far and now it was looking at her.

Its hair was bristly, its head square. Its enormous yellowish incisors forced it to hold its mouth half-open. It weighed almost ten pounds and it did not come from the surrounding countryside. It came from the foul-smelling collection of sewers that fed into the tunnels that reached the outlying urban areas. The rat wasn’t frightened by the young woman coming toward it. In fact, it watched her curiously, stretching the whiskers on its spiraliform muzzle. You’d almost have thought that it had its sights fixed on her.

Then the animal detected a vibration in the asphalt and froze. The silence filled with the roar of an engine coming ever closer. A pair of white headlights illuminated the woman’s silhouette, and finally the girl’s eyes were reflected in the horrified expression of another human being.

In the muggy, suffocating night, he went on telling the story of the crash.

Completely fucked up. You’re just doing your job but that day Christ on the Cross decides to turn a blind eye to you. When He abandons you, He abandons you. I’m just saying that already that morning, things had started off badly.

He’d told the story in the spring, and even before that, when the old single-pipe steam heating system was still struggling to ward off the chill in the recreation center, so that he, Orazio Basile, fifty-six years old, a former truck driver and now disabled, was forced to sniffle constantly. He sat there hunched over in his seat, his crutches crossed against the poker machine, with a grim, disgusted look on his face. And his audience—men on unemployment, steelworkers with ravaged lungs—listened closely every time, though not a comma of the story ever changed.

The rec center was in the old section of Taranto—the borgo antico—a small bean-shaped island connected to the rest of the city by the spans of a swing bridge. Charming, unless you lived there. Buildings with fronts eroded by time and by neglect, empty courtyards overgrown with weeds. Outside the rec center’s front door was a parking area where semitrailers were left overnight. Between one truck and the next you could see fishing boats bobbing in the water alongside the deserted wharf. Then huge red forked tongues of flame. The sea crisscrossed by reflections from the oil refinery.

That fucking city.

As Orazio said it, he widened his eyes. He spoke in dialect and he wasn’t referring to Taranto. The others pricked up their ears even before he opened his mouth. Watching him over time, they’d learned that the metronome preceded the opening notes of the music—the trouser leg stitched shut at knee length was coming to life. The stump bounced up and down, increasingly rapid and edgy.

That morning a faint blue haze covered the fields between Incisa and Montevarchi. He’d been at the wheel for hours, driving his delivery van down the A1. His passenger just wouldn’t stop talking. Orazio regretted having picked him up.

He’d left Taranto the previous afternoon and spent the night at a service area in Mugello, lulled to sleep by the reefer units on semitrailers packed with perishable food products. By 8:30 that morning he was on the outskirts of Genoa. He picked his way through the industrial park, down roads marked by implausible points of the compass. Electronics. Toys. Household Goods. One after another, he passed wholesale warehouses. Apparel. That’s where he slowed down. He rummaged through his pockets for the crumpled sheet of paper. He’d been there once months ago, but still he was afraid he might get mixed up. When the letters of the sign matched what was written on the paper, he stopped.

He let the warehousemen unload the merchandise. Five hundred pairs of jeans made in Puglia and destined for retail outlets across Northwest Italy. While the men were unloading the clothing, the owner emerged through a glass door from a small office.

Nice to see you again, said the wholesaler with a smile.

The man was about sixty, and wore a pinstriped three-piece suit that had seen better days, his choice of attire suggesting superstition more than stinginess. Business must have been thriving for years, as many years as it had taken to fray the jacket cuffs this badly.

Let’s go get a cup of coffee.

The wholesaler acted like someone who was sure he’d neither stepped across the watershed that marks the midpoint of a lifespan, nor was running the risk of doing so in the future. It would take more than twelve hours of driving to get back to Taranto; every minute was precious. Orazio was trying to come up with an excuse when the man laid a hand on his shoulder. Orazio let himself be jollied along. That had been his first mistake.

When they got back from the café, he’d followed the owner into his office to get his signature on the bills of lading. Only then did he see the cell phone salesman. The young man was sitting at the desk, reading the paper.

The son of a longtime friend, said the owner.

The kid stood up and came over to introduce himself. Slim-fit suit, black shoes. Just as relaxed as the wholesaler was, that was how hard it was for the thirty-year-old to keep both feet flat on the floor for more than three seconds at a time. Without moving his head, Orazio looked out the window at the leaden sky outside. He was eager to get going. The same kind of impatience that, Saturday nights in Taranto at the rec center, drove him to get into an argument with someone after a glass or two.

It’s practically a miracle that he’s alive, said the wholesaler.

The previous afternoon the salesman had crashed his Alfa 159 outside of Savona. A curve taken too fast. He was looking for a ride home.

He’s Pugliese, too, added the wholesaler.

Orazio snapped to. Where from? he asked.

The kid told him. The wholesaler nodded with satisfaction. One crash leads to another, thought Orazio. He considered the fact that giving him a ride wouldn’t take him out of his way. He could drop him off right after the toll barrier and then continue on to Taranto. Easier to say yes than to say no. And yet he could say no. The problem was the wholesaler: the bubble of bliss he was floating along in was a way of presuming—to the point of imposing—total understanding between Orazio and the salesman. Joviality capable of showing itself for what it really was—suspicion and arrogance—only if and when the bubble popped. But that hadn’t happened, ensuring that the wholesaler chose, like the last time, not to have the items of clothing counted before having them stacked in the warehouse along with other identical garments. All jeans of the same brand. An attitude the truck driver had counted on for this second trip. And so he’d had to give the youngster a ride.

The second mistake had been to let him spew all that nonsense.

His passenger had behaved perfectly until they stopped for coffee at the Sestri autogrill. Which is to say that for the remaining 560 miles, he’d never once shut up.

"First there’s the panorama of the Riviera di Ponente. You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure. Pine trees and citrus groves just steps from the sea. At that point, wham! and I’m sitting on the asphalt without even a scratch on me. Jesus Christ, you can’t begin to imagine. I didn’t really get what had happened myself. It was a brand new 159. Before that, I drove a VW Golf Variant."

He burst out laughing for no reason. A Variant, he said again.

The accelerated precision of someone who’ll go on being thirty well past the age of fifty. After all, he came from the regional capital. He spoke lightly of the danger he’d escaped . . . When His talon sweeps past, just grazing you and inflicting nothing worse than a scare, the thing to do is shut up and keep going.

Orazio continued to drive and pretended to ignore him. He was forced to acknowledge his undeniable existence, though, when, at Caianello, he wasn’t able to pull into the gas station. That’s where, if he hadn’t had the salesman along, he’d have met the fence and handed over the forty pairs of jeans he’d pilfered from his freight.

He would have set aside part of that money and whatever else was left after rent. The cash would come in handy the next time he had an argument with someone at the rec center. Like other times before, he’d choose to leave the center rather than get into a fistfight. He’d drive through the outskirts of Taranto until the lights of the refinery illuminated the city limits ever more faintly. A swarm of sparks would carve out the darkness at the end of a dirt lane. Whores. He’d head straight for them, thanking his lucky stars for leaving out on the streets the women he didn’t have at home.

Instead he’d had to keep going, which left the salesman free to take the initiative a little further down the road: What do you say we stop here for a piss? Let me buy you an espresso.

They set out again after a brief break. Orazio was on edge. He kept brooding over the income he’d so recently missed out on. He totted up numbers in his head as he drove, as twilight erased Irpinia and a clear, metal-black evening in late April descended over the plains of Puglia.

As they approached Candela they saw the enormous pylons of wind turbines in rows across the fields in the moonlight. They suggested a landscape imprisoned for too long in the realm of the imagination. Cars instead of horses. Mechanical towers instead of windmills. After ten minutes, the wind turbines vanished, and the horizon flattened.

The kid should have gotten off at the South Bari toll plaza. But just before they got there he said: Now, please, let me repay you.

He spoke of a restaurant in the center of town. From how he described it, a very fancy place. He reeled off dishes and brands of wine, and when he stopped he still hadn’t finished—Orazio had nodded in agreement. His third mistake. It wasn’t greed but exhaustion that had convinced him that, when the kid offered to treat him to dinner, the damage was going to be made whole, at least in part.

They pulled through the South Bari toll barrier and headed toward the coast.

Quídde paíse de mmerd’!

At this point in the story—when he referred in dialect to that fucking city—Orazio was usually already standing up. He’d hoisted himself erect with one hand gripping the armrest of his chair while, with the other, he harpooned his crutches. The effort charged him with an angry energy that swept over the counter and the bottles behind the bar, as well as over his audience as they nodded, in the throes of indignation, well aware that their own city might be an endless list of disasters and infamies of every kind. But Bari was even worse.

Any mentally sane individual would feel dismay upon entering Taranto from the Ionian state highway. The tranquil promise of the seacoast shattered against the crusher towers of the cement plant, against the fractionating columns of the refinery, against the mills, against the mineral dumps of the gigantic industrial complex that clawed the city. Every so often a foreman would be carted off in an ambulance after a grinding machine spun out of control. A plant worker would find his forearm stripped bare to the bone by the explosion of a machine tool. The machinery was organized so that it hurt men according to a cost-benefit equation calibrated by other men in offices where they optimized the most unbridled perversions. The regional assemblies ratified them, and the courts acquitted them at the end of battles the local press fed on. Thus, Taranto was a city of blast furnaces. But Bari was a city of offices, courthouses, journalists, and sports clubs. In Taranto it was possible to link a urothelial cell carcinoma classified as highly improbable in an adolescent to the presence of dioxin, used in ninety percent of Italy’s entire national production. But in Bari, on Sunday afternoons, an elderly appeals court judge might sit comfortably on the living room sofa watching his granddaughter pretend to swing a hula hoop around her hips, dressed in a filthy pair of sneakers and nothing else. That episode had been recounted by a worker at the cement plant whose own daughter was working as a maid in the regional capital.

That’s why he shouldn’t have accepted the salesman’s invitation. What did it matter if he’d gotten a home of his own out of the story? Four sparkly clean rooms in a building in the better part of Taranto.

In Bari, after dinner, he abandoned the salesman to his fate.

He had no time to enjoy the solitude because he immediately got lost. He made a left turn, then a right and then another right, and found himself right back under the blinking neon owl outside the eyeglasses store. He cursed as he swung the van around. An advertising panel scrolled vertically from a sunny ad for toothpaste to a velvety one for a clothing store. That was when Orazio thought about the jeans still hidden in the van.

After driving around aimlessly for half an hour, he pulled onto the bridge that connected the center of town to the residential area. Ten minutes later he saw the Ikea tower and felt relief. He realized that he was on the state highway facing the cement barrier that separated the traffic going in opposite directions.

The person he was all this time later made a tremendous effort to lift a crutch to shoulder height. Wild-eyed, he pointed to the dark space beyond the breakwater, as if to say that not even a Man who’d come walking over the waters could have warded off his accident. The mistakes had piled up in the empty primordial space where life stories are written before the events make them indelible and comprehensible.

He barreled down the deserted state highway, jamming on the accelerator. The roadway rose so that the vineyards stretched out as far as the eye could see. The moon was just a few days short of full and right now it gave the illusion that it could wax ad infinitum. He accelerated into the curve, altering the relationship between the passing seconds and the reflectors on the pavement. In the distance, beyond a second curve, he saw the inflatable man flailing wildly atop the roof of an auto repair shop. There was something ridiculous about the dance. Orazio furrowed his eyebrows without losing sight of the angle of the road: the absence of lights in the visible stretch corresponded to the lack of dangers in the blind spot. He would have been able to see a car with its parking lights out of order. But what happened was impossible to avoid.

A woman, or maybe she was a girl. She was walking in the exact center of the roadway, completely naked, and covered with blood.

He violently jerked the wheel to the right. That was a mistake, since the van immediately shot in the opposite direction. It went whizzing past the girl. It hit the guardrail. The van slid across the road until it smashed into the barrier on the opposite side. It tipped, flipped, and landed on its side, so that he could very clearly see the wall of metal coming back toward him.

He woke up again at Bari General Hospital, in a room with bare walls where an old man with a fractured femur kept moaning.

The first signs of a sunny morning entered through the window. Dazed by the pain medicine, Orazio reached his arm out toward the nightstand. He felt his other arm. He grabbed the bottle. The long drink of water refreshed him—his thoughts lined up in a bridge of light, but then collapsed, jumping back into line in a different order.

He’d had a crash, but he was alive. A nasty crash. He remembered the highway, even the salesman. The van must be a wreck. Then something. An opalescent marble glittered amidst the rough gears he was using to reconstruct what had happened. That was strange, because the gears were interlocking, while the marble floated in thin air. It gleamed again and disappeared. The girl. That had to be a ghost, an imaginary shape risen from the depths of consciousness. He felt an itch. The patient in the adjoining bed wouldn’t stop whining. He scratched his face. He scratched his left hand with his right. Still, an itch. He jerked himself upright, into a sitting position. He felt a tug, reached his arm down toward his right leg.

Two nurses came running at the sound of his screaming.

The next morning, as he lay in bed with the stump of his leg draining, the head physician came to see him, accompanied by a nurse. From that point on, Orazio began to believe that the girl was real.

The doctor was an old man, tall and deathly pale, with wispy white hair. He leaned over him. He observed him longer than was necessary. He smiled. He re-assumed the chilly persona that must have fit him comfortably and spoke to the nurse. The stump needed to be washed with delicate soap, he told her. An antiperspirant would reduce excessive sweating, while the inflammations should be treated with lotions.

A corticosteroid cream, he specified in a voice that was a caress to the patient’s ears, and an order to the nurse.

Public hospitals. Orazio knew those places. Once a cousin of his had had her appendix removed, and after the operation they’d left her in the hallway for five hours. The head physician was a nameplate on a door with no one ever behind it. However much the old man might look at him, from behind the protection of his summa cum laude degrees, Orazio recognized in his eyes a strange eagerness to please.

And so he lay motionless in the bed. He stared at the head physician so that the old man’s eyes followed his as he shifted them toward the other bed.

Isn’t there a fucking thing you can do to make him shut up?

Two hours later, he’d been moved. A single room with a private bathroom. Really, an oversized room overlooking the eucalyptus trees in the courtyard. Maybe an oversized records room, emptied out at the last second, to which had been added a bed, a bedside table, and a television stand. Each of which now emanated the dreary aura of objects out of place.

They got him settled in the bed, vanished for a few hours. In the afternoon, a nurse came in carrying a tray with coffee and grapefruit juice. He furrowed his brow and glared at her. He pushed aside the tray, freeing up his line of sight. What a pathetic excuse for a screen. He asked them to replace the television set. The next day two attendants were carrying in a 32-inch set fresh from the mall.

When the head physician came by to see him again, Orazio asked to have the nurse stationed outside the door. His request was granted.

The next day, the head physician returned, escorted by two men in dark suits. Under the jacket of the first man he glimpsed a dangling hem that looked very much as if it, too, might belong to a labcoat. The second man was in his early fifties, and his hair was brylcreemed. Notable polka-dot tie, chunky-toothed smile. He introduced himself: I’m Engineer Ranieri. They started talking. The first man felt called upon to lower the shades, thinning the light.

At this point, no one was bringing up blood alcohol levels. At the rec center, no one was making any more wisecracks about the possibility that the crash had been fatal mostly for his memory. Those jokes had been made at first. He’d tell the story and the others would shake their heads. One of them had gotten hold of a copy of the paper from the day when the news report should have been published. Well? He slapped the counter with the rolled-up paper. There they are, the things that happened that day. An out-of-work man had set fire to himself outside the Apple Store on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. The daughter of a well-known builder and developer had killed herself by jumping off the top tier of a parking structure. There was also a car crash on a highway, but on the Autostrada Adriatica. No reports of a girl on State Highway 100 at two in the morning—neither naked, nor dressed, nor blood-smeared, nothing at all.

So, Ora’, do you want to tell us what really happened?

But a few weeks later, Orazio had moved house. From the one-bedroom apartment in the old part of the city he’d moved into an airy apartment overlooking Via d’Aquino. The only problem was that there was no elevator. Absurd as it seems, he only realized it the second time he tried to climb the stairs, hobbling up them on his crutches. He didn’t like it one bit. Three months later, a team of construction workers was hard at work on the scaffolding that rose up the side of the apartment building.

To anyone not convinced by the stump of his leg, this was more than adequate.

But Orazio hadn’t stopped thinking about the girl.

It was early May, his hospital stay was coming to an end. One after the other, they’d unhooked his tubes and lightened his dose of pharmaceuticals. They’d given him a pair of crutches.

After his conversation with the head physician, it had become clear to him that it had been no dream. From a simple ghost, he had transformed the girl into the cause of the accident. Only that meant he’d now placed her in a service role that likewise stripped her of significance. She became the cause of the crash just as a tree or an oil patch might have been, as if tree and oil patch were logical transitions capable of leading to the word amputation.

Every now and then, curses echoed through the hall. That’s when they called for the orthopedic surgeon.

It wasn’t just the fact that he mentally perceived the presence of his leg. He caught himself actually moving the toes of his right foot, he felt an itch on his right ankle, and pain—piercing stabs between his kneecap and shinbone, or on the knee that was no longer there. He clenched his teeth and broke out in a cold sweat.

Then, one night, he tracked the girl down once and for all.

The hospital was shrouded in silence. The laments of the other patients didn’t reach his room. Neither, for that matter, did the sounds of the voices of the staff on duty. He had fallen asleep watching TV. He’d awakened with a start to a commercial for a jeweler offering to buy gold at twenty-five euros a gram. Two young men were rummaging around in a corpse’s mouth, and in the next scene they were handing over the gold teeth to the jeweler. He switched off the television set, and rolled over onto his side. He must have fallen asleep at the precise moment he felt the urge to go to the bathroom. He dragged himself out of bed with his mind elsewhere, convinced he’d be able to support himself on both legs. He collapsed face-first onto the floor.

Angry, discomfited, he felt the chill on his forehead.

He tried to get himself into a sitting position by lifting with both hands. His breathing was labored. The room was immersed in quiet. The shadow of the eucalyptus trees stretched across the ceiling so that the leafy branches turned into seaweed, coral branches tossing in the shifting currents. His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. It seemed to him that the floor was swept by a faint luminescence—the catalysis of fireflies and sea anemones—the radiance of the early May nights that the absence of artificial light gradually revealed. But the light that was capable of leaving him open-mouthed was right in front of him.

Further on, beyond the wide-open bathroom door, the magnifying mirror fastened to the wall was flooded with the moon. Reduced by half up in the sky, it still appeared full in the concavity of the reflective surface—a silvery puddle that emerged from the past, at the bottom of which he seemed to find her again. The small opaque patch took form, drawing closer. Orazio realized once and for all that she was beautiful. He realized that she was in her death throes. He realized, with a shiver, that sheer will couldn’t have kept anyone on their feet like that, which meant there had been something else making her place one foot in front of the other. Movement itself, more than that from which the movement physically derived. A quicksand, a dead swelling beneath the summer rain.

He understood, above all, that he’d swerved not to avoid her but to save himself, because everything about her was a magnet and an absence of will, the hypnotic call that, once followed, makes everything identical and perfect, so that we cease to exist.

Seated on the sofa, his legs crossed, he crooked his arm along the armrest so that he held the handsome gold watch dial up before his eyes. It was a quarter to three in the morning, and Vittorio was waiting for the phone call that would tell him whether or not his daughter was still alive.

He was breathing slowly in the den of the villa that he’d purchased after the birth of his eldest child. The first person to live there had been a large landowner under the Bourbon dynasty. It had become the property of the local podestà, and then passed into the hands of an elderly senator who wisely stopped thinking of it as his home when, sensing as he dozed the pull of the thread tying him to Rome, he attributed, night after night, a syllable to every jerk of the string, so that he was able to read in advance the judicial sentences of the coming year. At that point, Vittorio Salvemini made the first bad bargain of his life, purchasing the building at market price.

It was 1971, and the employees of the neighboring South Bari Tennis Club saw him arrive one morning, escorted by a small team of men, the bare minimum necessary. Tall and tan, dressed in a tailor-made linen suit, he clenched between his lips a self-satisfied smirk that no tailor would have attributed to a tradition older than ten years. The others were too rough even for the furthest outlying areas—five men, short and muscular, to whom even dialect was an achievement. They walked up the drive, one after another taking the lead with sharp shouts, sniffing the air like the vanguard of a barbarian king who had just crossed the sheltering Alps.

Here comes another one who doesn’t know his place, thought the custodian of the tennis club, lowering his gaze to the chalk lines he hadn’t stopped tracing.

The senator had come close to transforming the villa into a modern residence behind the art nouveau façade. Vittorio was of another mind. He had the furniture heaped up in the garden. He ordered his men to uproot the marble statues, and beneath them reappeared the slabs of stone aggregate. Every time he heard a hollow sound when he rapped his knuckles against the wall, his face lit up. Away with the partition walls, away with the false ceilings. The workers knocked down one wall after another.

The men, it later emerged, came from the same town where he was born. They would have been normal farmhands if the times they lived in hadn’t left them unemployed before they could learn the trade from their fathers. More than out-of-work laborers, they were his slaves, creatures without a past, faithful and willing to do anything. They hauled sacks bursting with rubble and garbage without ever taking a break, and they’d have tried to rotate a house barehanded if he’d asked them, because he, not they—at least so they believed—knew precisely the point beyond which they would collapse, never to rise again.

Vittorio wanted them to finish the work in just a few weeks. To save time, he one morning authorized them to burn all the furniture he had no intention of reusing down at the far end of the garden. After half an hour, one of the workers came running up to him, out of breath. He was gesticulating. On his face was an expression of disbelief. Vittorio followed him. Just on the other side of the boundary line between properties, a number of men were gesturing in indignation. Two of them wore shorts and polo shirts. They were pointing at the black column rising into the sky.

The smoke, after drifting across the tennis courts, was brushing against the gazebo, where loungers had been hastily abandoned by ladies in swimsuits who were now chattering indignantly, their hands on their hips.

I’m so sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me.

He made a show of bowing in an exaggerated fashion. He was smiling. A part of him was flattered by the idea that he’d bought a house in a neighborhood where, albeit for a complaint, he could attract the attention of these kinds of people, men who, even in their underwear, could evoke the image of a gold nameplate screwed into the door of an office that they had never needed to take by storm. Their faces luxuriated in a special form of relaxation, the apparent state of idiocy particular to the privileged, in which Vittorio identified a further form of intelligence. No trace of the metal foil that darkens beneath the skin thanks to friction with the world. Their grandfathers might perhaps have felt fear in their lives, and their fathers only the volatile apprehension that filled the monarchs of bygone times with wisdom.

Still, a part of that part of him would instead have led him to kneel at their feet, to kiss the marks of the tennis balls that they’d been driving for decades over the red clay.

My workers must have thought that the wind would blow all day long toward the road, he lied, because it would have been worse to admit that it had never occurred to him that at that time of the day men might be doing something other than work, or that women would be out of the house for reasons other than adultery.

I see that there’s a bar, he went on, pointing to the gazebo, and I realize that I’ve inconvenienced them as well. And so . . .

"You have first-rate powers of observation."

No one laughed. The man who had spoken was in his early fifties, not especially tall, all gussied up at ten in the morning. Jacket and trousers draped in a facsimile of elegance, an intentional step behind genuine elegance, but only so as to show it the way. Vittorio decided that this must be the club director. He remained confident: And so, in the hope you’ll forgive me . . . he went on, and as he spoke, he felt a twinge of hope quiver in his chest, I’d like to treat you all to a nice round of champagne.

Two men turned on their heels then and there. They headed off toward the tennis courts as if the offer had settled any remaining doubts about the stranger.

Signor . . . ? the director smiled with venomous charm.

Vittorio uttered first and last name, hoping that the man was capable of glimpsing them from the future, the letters, from that perspective, written in an ever larger typeface, the way he saw them himself on the days when inspiration (nothing but the anguish of the talented) allowed him to perch at the far end of the decade.

Signor Salvemini, the man went on, to enter this club all you need is a membership pass. It’s small and rectangular, and to procure one you need to submit a request supported by five members who’ve renewed their own memberships for the past ten years. Which of our old friends have the pleasure of being yours as well?

A few more men moved away. Vittorio did not retreat. As more

Reviews for Ferocity

[devilish2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An elliptical, lyrical exploration of family, corruption and living in southern Italy. The translation was not the best but the writing still shone through.A naked woman is run over in the night. Clara is found dead after jumping off a multi-storey car park. Her brother Michele starts asking questions and examining himself and his family.